American press remains free to defend itself against nine-figure lawsuits

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments
Peter Thiel makes a grasping, strangling gesture.

Peter Thiel makes a grasping, strangling gesture.

The New York-based gossip website Gawker.com shut down yesterday, after its parent company, Gawker Media, lost a $140 million lawsuit to Hulk Hogan. Univision purchased Gawker Media from bankruptcy and will continue publishing many sites in the network, including Deadspin and Gizmodo, but the flagship has been eliminated. Yesterday, former executive features editor Tom Scocca published this scathing postmortem advancing two points, one of which I find more interesting than the other. First, he contends that Gawker was effectively gaslighted by its enemies, who convinced founder Nick Denton and other key members of the staff that they really were operating beyond the pale of respectable journalism. That seems both plausible and unfalsifiable. Second, and more compellingly, Scocca suggests that freedom of the press is complicated when billionaires can fund massive lawsuits designed to put media companies out of business. Background and consideration after the jump.

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Gawker induces Trump to retweet Mussolini

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 0 Comment
I'll start with the white salad and move on to the Trumpolini with crabs.

I’ll start with the white salad and move on to the Trumpolini with crabs.

Early Sunday morning, Donald Trump’s twitter account retweeted this quote from Italian fascist and humorous World War II adversary Benito Mussolini:

This prank was the work of Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg, who created a bot account called @ilduce2016 that tweets quotes from Mussolini but attributes them to Donald Trump. It’s kind of funny, although the formatting of this particular tweet makes it look like @ilduce2016 was only tagging Trump, not citing him. But no matter: Trump saw this quote and thought it was insightful, plus maybe flattering to him, and he retweeted it to his 6.5 million followers. We can start calling him The Deuce now, right?

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Is this satire?

By Dan Brooks in Is this ironic? 1 Comment
The Gawker article in question

The Gawker article in question

Yesterday, Gawker published this article titled I Haven’t Seen Star Wars Yet But I Bet it Doesn’t Pass the Bechdel Test. Presumably, it was not sincere. It seems to be a response to reports that Star Wars: The Force Awakens passes the Bechdel Test, a standard of gender representation in film that demands two named female characters talk to each other about something other than a man. Gawker contributor Allie Jones argues that although she has not seen The Force Awakens—or any Star Wars movie, for that matter—it is extremely unlikely that the new sequel is Bechdel-compliant. Quote:

Think about it for one second: A Star Wars movie that passes the Bechdel test? Uhh, sure. Not.

I haven’t seen this new movie yet, nor have I seen any of the other Star Wars movies. I’m still pretty confident that there is no Star Wars scene in which two women talk about something other than a man or a male robot or whatever.

I’m going to say she is putting us on. Contradicting the account of people who saw the new Star Wars movie on her authority as a person who has seen no Star Wars movies seems too egregious to be sincere. What we have here is some form of irony, but is it satire? Or what?

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Micro-genre alert: Bad first date stories

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments

First of all, the premise of the Mystery Date board game is awesome. Someone knocks on your door; you don’t know who it is, and you go on a date with them. How did they know where you live? It doesn’t matter—you’re just relieved that you did not draw the nerd card. As any semi-adolescent girl will tell you, drawing the nerd card is a catastrophic event. It is positively newsworthy, in fact. Proof: this Gawker piece series of screenshots about passive-aggressive text messages from a lawyer who showed up to the first date wearing a fedora. The fedora is key.* It establishes that the man whose text messages have now been viewed 77,000 times is an unsympathetic character, and we do not need to consider the implications of using the most sophisticated communications medium in human history to be catty about a bad date. It’s the same rhetorical device we see in this first date story and this one.

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Regarding Magic: The Gathering and Being Cool

By Dan Brooks in Being Cool 14 Comments

Cards from the game Magic: The Gathering. Cool, right?

Yesterday, a Gizmodo editor named Alyssa Bereznak posted this article about her Ok Cupid date with former Magic: The Gathering world champion Jon Finkel. I’m sure you have a lot of questions now, all of which it will embarrass me to answer:

  1. Ok Cupid is an online dating site. I am a member, but only because I work at home and I’m really lonely and people find me unsettling and gross in real life.
  2. Magic: The Gathering is a card-based strategy game set in a fantasy world with, like, wizards. I played and enjoyed it all through college.
  3. Jon Finkel is arguably the best-known professional Magic player of all time, and he seems like a nice guy.

I feel like I just took my pants off at the bus station.

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